


L’État, C’est –

by akathecentimetre



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Episode: s03e09 The Prize, Extraneous History, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-28
Updated: 2016-07-28
Packaged: 2018-07-27 08:38:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7611187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akathecentimetre/pseuds/akathecentimetre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <b>MAJOR SPOILER FOR S03E09 'THE PRIZE.'</b>
</p><p>Treville finds himself thinking, in a crucial moment, about the nature of the state - and his unbending duty towards it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	L’État, C’est –

*

When he is young, he fights in the Palatinate. He learns how to sleep in the mud, how to subsist eating only grass, and how to resist the craving for meat when the only flesh that’s left to eat is that of his former comrades, struck down by months of being closed in by siege.

He thinks, then, that what upholds a state can only be the land that you hold. This scrap of earth, this palisade, this wooden fence. It cannot be uprooted; it can be burned, plowed by gun carriages and sown with salt, but it can never disappear.

Fighting in Holland, in the districts they call Waterland, teaches him that the land _can_ melt away. It can vanish like that, in an instant, if it is God’s will – overflown, turned to brine and bog. And then he learns that man can do this, too: that it is men who can open dikes and sluices and, though they weep at the sight of their own farms being consumed by the ocean, they never close their eyes to it. They stand grimly and watch, glad that they still _can_ stand, and he thinks: so it isn’t the land that makes a nation. It is its men.

He’s known this truth, in the back of his mind, since he first took up arms at the age of sixteen. It hadn’t been hard to sense when you had come across another man who was a soldier at heart, who would share his bread with you or judiciously save it for you both, for later; who could load a musket in his sleep, the twenty-four movements of it ingrained into his palms.

These men are France, he says to himself, years later – but they all look the same. He loses track of faces by the time he is thirty, as he ascends through the ranks and the need to know anyone by name diminishes in turn. He knows them by where they have been, how long they have served. Ranked _en masse_ , they are his country; but when seen in the street, begging or hungry or thieving, he prefers to let the metaphor lie.

It’s only when he first meets the King that he understands.

He still finds himself dazzled by it, even when he has been Captain for close to a decade and he has seen more than enough of court life. God breathes on it, he sometimes finds himself thinking, fancifully: God takes the Louvre into his hands and his presence fills it with gold, a maelstrom of jewels and power divinely ordained. In his weaker moments, he wonders whether, when he shrugs on his own silver threads and blue silk embossed with fleur-de-lises, he might be close enough to taste it. This perfect little world, untroubled, this icon: this France, and when he receives the news that it is to be disrupted he is so totally unashamed of his tears that he doesn’t bother to wipe them away.

France dies in the gardens, choking on blood. France lives, in the quivering little bundle, mop-haired, that he carries from the palace.

France is vast enough that even he has never seen every corner of it, nor is he likely to; France is barely formed, speaks dozens of languages, is invaded on all sides, can command fleets and armies; France loves and hates her people, huddles protectively and unfeelingly around the cesspit that is Paris, its pride and joy.

France is small enough to fit into the crook of his elbow. France has fallen asleep there, on occasion, sighing and dreaming of toy soldiers made of wood.

France is heavy, so very heavy, when the first bullet buries itself between Treville’s ribs. Dear God, the child is heavy, so entirely precious, and for the briefest of instants he is starkly terrified that only his momentum will keep him barreling forward against the weight of his burden.

He’s lived forty-seven years, and has been in service for most of them. Louis didn’t get that many, he thinks, delirious, as he fetches up against Porthos’s saddle. But France –

France will, he thinks, and hoists upwards with all his strength. France is and shall be eternal, his purpose, his _vera causa, vive le roy!_

Louis – France looks at him, and understands. God help him, the child already knows.

He will not die alone, at least, he knows. His blood will irrigate France’s fields, he thinks, as he turns, as he draws. He will be welcomed into her earth, into ground that will always be hers no matter how many times it is fought over.

And the child knows, and will remember him.

France will remember him – and that is more than enough.

*

**FIN**

*


End file.
